[News] [SOT] On Fighting Back About E-mail Spying in the UK - Linux

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UK Slows Down Plan for Sweeping Electronic Surveillance
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| The British government is slowing down a proposal that would give law
| enforcement sweeping power to collect electronic data as a ...

[News] [SOT] On Fighting Back About E-mail Spying in the UK

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UK Slows Down Plan for Sweeping Electronic Surveillance

,----[ Quote ]
| The British government is slowing down a proposal that would give law
| enforcement sweeping power to collect electronic data as a measure to prevent
| terrorism.
|
| The proposal, in the Communications Data Bill, would allow the government to
| collect data on phone calls and other electronic communication. The
| government planned to put the proposal in Parliament's upcoming legislative
| agenda, but opted instead on Wednesday to conduct a consultation next year
| due to concerns about intrusive monitoring of private citizens.
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| Yes, of course: what we need to do is *increase* the volume of spam, say, a
| thousand-fold - easy enough to do if you sign up for a few obviously dodgy
| Web sites, and reply to a few spam messages with your address. That would be
| inconvenient for us, but not a problem given the efficiency of spam filters
| these days (Gmail catches about 99.5% of the spam that I receive). But
| multiplying the quantity of information that the UK Government's
| super-snooping database would need to hold by a factor of one thousand would
| really cause the rivets to pop. And once databases scale up to cope with
| that, we just turn up the spam volume a little more.
|
| Perhaps the same approach could be applied to Web browsing: you could write
| an add-in for Firefox that pulls in thousands of random pages from the
| Internet every day (text only). This, again, would add enormously to the
| storage requirements of any database, and make finding stuff much harder.
|
| If the UK Government wants to live by technology abuse, then let it die by
| technology abuse. Alternatively, it might try actually listening to what
| people like Fishenden and countless other IT experts say about how unworkable
| this scheme is, and work *with* us rather *against* us on this matter....
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